This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household.
Exodus 12:2-3
For the Hebrew slaves, this first Passover changed everything! It changed their future, it changed their identity, and it even changed their calendar!
Let’s start with their future. Imagine that you are one of these Hebrew slaves. All your life, all you have known is forced labor. You have scars from the whip on your back and callouses on your hands from making bricks. Your clothes are torn. Your house and belongings are meagre. On the night of Passover as you lay your head down on your pillow, you’re a slave, but by morning you will walk out of Egypt a free man or woman headed for the Promised Land. Talk about an overnight sensation! Can you imagine? Everything about their situation and their future prospects changed in a single night.
So the Passover changed their future, but it also changed their identity. This is the night the nation of Israel was born. Don’t forget that when Israel went down to Egypt they were a family of only about 70 people. While they were in Egypt they were just slaves identified by their common ethnicity. But on the night of Passover they went from being a bunch of slaves to being a nation… a people… God’s people, purchased and redeemed by Him. The family that entered Egypt with seventy people, walked out of Egypt armed for battle like a nation of probably about 2 million people.
So Passover changed their future and it changed their identity, but it also changed their calendar. God tells them that this moment is so significant that even the way they reckon time should be reoriented around it. From now on this will be the first month of the year for Israel, and He commands them to begin making preparations to celebrate Passover on the 10th day of the month. Why? I suppose because this was the tenth plague. The Passover itself would be celebrated on the 14th day of the month and it would begin a seven day feast called the Feast of Unleavened Bread. This was their new year. Every year began with a reminder of who they were and what God had done for them.
This is instructive for us because as Christians we have also experienced a life-altering event. You see the Exodus is a picture of Christian salvation. Just as Israel was enslaved in wicked Egypt, every single one of us was enslaved in this wicked world. They were enslaved to Egyptians, we were enslaved to sin and our own fleshly desires. But a Deliverer came for Israel and a Deliverer has come for us as well.
And what was the means of their ultimate redemption? It was the blood of a lamb. A lamb died in their place and its blood was applied on the doorpost as a covering over their families. It is the same with us. We deserve death and judgment, every single one of us, and the only way that we can be spared this fate is by the blood of the lamb being applied to our lives. Jesus became the Passover lamb, without spot or blemish (without sin), slain in the midst of Passover week. But His blood must be applied to your life personally. The Israelites had to take the blood and apply it to their doorposts, you have to apply it to your heart. They did it with a bunch of hyssop and a basin. You must do it through belief and prayer. When a person does this, when they place their faith in Jesus and His blood is applied to their lives… it changes everything.
Our future is changed. Israel was headed for a promised land and so are we. Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us. Not only our future but our identity has been changed as well. When you got saved you went from being an enemy of God to being a son or daughter of God. Your salvation was your entrance into a new nation, a new kingdom, a new people, God’s people. And all of this, whether you realize it or not, reoriented your calendar as well. The Israelites shifted their annual calendar in response to Passover. Christians shift our weekly calendar to reflect what Jesus has done. Jesus and His disciples celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday. That’s the day they would have gone to the synagogue. Why do we meet on Sunday mornings? Because it was early on the first day of the week, that Jesus was raised from the dead. It was on a Sunday morning that Jesus won the victory over the Enemy, and beat the power of death and opened up a way of salvation for us. So we reorient our weekly calendar around that monumental event, and our whole lives ought to be reoriented around it as well.
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